Portrait of Lorenzo di Credi

For a long time people thought this was a self-portrait, because an old inscription on the back named the sitter, a painter called Lorenzo di Credi, and gave the year 1488 and his age, 32. But the hand that actually painted it was almost certainly someone else's, a friend and fellow painter named Perugino. The two had trained together in Florence, in the busy workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, the same shop where a young Leonardo da Vinci learned his trade. So this is one Renaissance painter portraying another, both of them products of the same crowded studio. The plain dark cap and the steady, slightly wary gaze are exactly the sober style Florentine portraits favoured in those years.